The Year of the Angry Voter

I’VE been having a hard time understanding the mood of the country. I turn on the television, and I see a land where to be a citizen means to specialize in the venting of spleen.

It’s the Year of the Angry Voter, and apparently it’s vitriol itself, rather than any particular strategy for the future, that’s propelling the electorate. “Our country is being run by incompetent people,” Donald J. Trump has said. “And I won’t be angry when we fix it, but until we fix it, I’m very, very angry.” Bernie Sanders is angry, too: “I am angry. The American people are angry.”

No wonder they both triumphed in New Hampshire on Tuesday. Everybody is angry, from the left to the right. Everybody, that is, except me.

Which is not to say that I’m not upset about many things. The stagnation of wages; police murders of unarmed black youth; continuing resistance to equality for L.G.B.T. people; Google’s and Amazon’s slow devouring of the publishing industry. All of these are issues that I feel passionately about.

But passion is different than wrath. Passion means being motivated to create change. Wrath … well, once upon a time there was a columnist for The Weekly World News who called himself “Ed Anger.” His columns were usually devoted to issues that made him, in his phrase, “pig-biting mad.”

I want to make the world better, for myself and for my children. But I don’t want to bite any pigs.

When I was young, I was taught that anger is a sin, and forgiveness a virtue. In the “Inferno,” the Angry dwell in the fifth circle of hell. They thrash it out in the river Styx, where the wrathful struggle on the surface of the water and the sullen drown below.

One thing that baffles me is that many of the angriest voters are also those associated with communities of faith. By what logic can the devout commit the sin of anger, and resist the call of its antidotes, the virtues of forgiveness and understanding?

As Anne Lamott wrote, “Not forgiving is like drinking rat poison and then waiting for the rat to die.”

And yet, Testaments Old and New are full of stories of vengeance and wrath. Christ himself throws something of a tantrum when he arrives in the Temple and finds it overtaken by money changers and animals. He overturns tables, lashes a whip and yells about injustice. It’s not exactly “Gentle Jesus Meek and Mild,” a hymn that for some reason I always confused with that old advertisement for Palmolive dishwashing liquid, which “softens hands while you do the dishes.”

But this story used to confuse me. If Christ himself was able to express such unbridled anger, then how could anger be a sin?

The Rev. Amy Butler at Riverside Church in New York suggests that there are really two kinds of anger: the kind that is the fruit of our own egos, and the other kind, that is focused outward, on the injustice of the world. In a sermon, she said, “Either our instinctual response to threat is all about us — who we are, what we want, what we need — or it becomes about something bigger than ourselves.”

In other words, it’s one thing to be angry because you don’t like one of the moderators at your debate; it’s another to be angry because you think, for instance, that the entire electoral process is rigged to benefit the wealthy. The first kind lands one in the fifth circle of hell, gurgling in the Styx. The second can be a force for good, a possible first step on the road to change.

Mr. Trump and others in this election have performed a sleight of hand that makes their own narcissistic anger look like a revolution. They have created an anger transmogrification machine, leading voters to misconstrue the fury of egotists for the transformative anger that helps change the world.

But a movement founded upon narcissistic wrath cannot lead to a better future.

What we need in the United States is not anger, but forgiveness.

When I was a teenager, I decided one summer day that having a shaving-cream-pie fight would be the best use of my time, and since a shaving-cream-pie fight isn’t really much fun if you’re the only one having it, I invited over a large crowd to share in this activity.

Things didn’t end well. There were bloody noses and ruined clothes, and enough people jumped or were pushed into a neighborhood swimming pool that the profusion of sudsy froth killed the pool filter.

This is what it feels like to be an American right now: a witness to a shaving-cream- pie fight that has somehow foamed out of control.

I want to gather together everyone running for office and sit them down before my father, as I was seated, at the end of that long summer day. It would be good for them to hear the counsel my father gave to me, words that other fathers, and mothers, have doubtlessly said since the beginning of time: “I’m not angry,” he observed. “I’m just terribly, terribly disappointed.”

Jennifer Finney Boylan is a professor of English at Barnard College, the author of “Stuck in the Middle With You: Parenthood in Three Genders,” and a contributing opinion writer.